The example suite definitely has something basic for each thing you need - there's definitely a character mesh, and definitely enough animation to make it not crash (even if that might just be the character floating around in a T-pose).

MakeHuman is probably a good thing to use as a base as its output is CC0. I think we might be somewhat stuck with Morrowind's original skeleton (or at least its bone count and naming) right now, but you'll have to ask someone who actually knows about that part of the engine. It shouldn't be too hard to knock up some intentionally terrible animations in Blender to use in the short term, but I'm not sure there's any good animation data that's got a super permissive licence and is easy to work with. Animators are expensive. I could be completely wrong about that.

Another possibility is to look for something somewhere like the Unity asset store and get something that you can convert to an OpenMW-compatible format via Blender. This will probably require money, and you still might well end up with something of placeholder quality when compared to games that actually get played.

But... character models and animations. That's where things get tricky. Anyone have ideas?

As mentioned above, MakeHuman is a good start for character models (without clothes mostly) when you have limited skills/knowledge.
If you're using Blender, then I can recommend the Rigify addon and Mocap tools addon, there are many free mocap data libraries online, if you import those anomations and retarget them to the OpenMW rig, then you should have enough options.
From my own experience I can tell that this process is quite time consuming, still much faster than animating everything from scratch by yourself though.